2) 
of a local Natural Science Society. You have in this neighbourhood an 
older boulder clay, with fragments which must have come from the great 
centres of ice-dispersion of Snowdon and the Lake District; you have 
above that a series of sands and gravels, with shells which, with few 
exceptions, are of species still found on the neighbouring coast ; above that 
more clays, often with boulders from distant mountains, What does this 
mean? Have you here the record of a warm interglacial period and a 
recurrence of cold sufficiently severe to bring the Snowdonian ice again 
into the vales of Clwyd and Dee? or has the upper clay derived its far- 
transported boulders from the older drift, and therefore be in itself no evi- 
dence of the return of a great ice sheet? During the submergence which 
left the Moel Tryfaen and Macclesfield shell-drift the sea must have rolled 
across from the estuary of the Dee to East Anglia. Has all the evidence 
by which we might correlate deposits of that age in Cheshire, on the 
watershed and in East Anglia, been swept away? There is much to be 
done, but to do it we must have hard work on special branches and co- 
operation among the students of the different subjects. I think I see in 
the programme of the Chester Society of Natural Science a full recognition 
of these principles. Special lines of study are taken by different sections, 
but all are combined in one Society and one museum, and it seems to me 
that good work is being done in each. Only one paper has yet been 
published by the Society, but that is a collection of facts—useful to place 
on record. Work done here and brought before this Society has often 
been published elsewhere. Perhaps it will be well to make arrangements 
for the regular publication of, at any rate, abstracts of all our papers, and 
ashort report of all our proceedings. But great as is the value of the 
actual work done by local societies in collecting and recording evidence 
which helps to explain the phenomena of nature and so push on the work 
of the world, yet it is not in this that their chief benefit consist—it is in 
the effect of such pursuits, systematically carried on, in the minds of the 
workers themselves. As far as mental training is concerned it is not of 
such great importance to consider what we do as how we doit ; and though 
the consequences of inexactness are more immediately and obviously 
disastrous in some studies than in others, still in all it is sooner or later felt 
that accuracy is the first requisite. 
Perhaps in no pursuit have we so much opportunity as in that of Natural 
Science of showing the true place of ingenious hypothesis, to explain 
phenomena where data are few, and of appreciating the distinction between 
that and proof depending upon how far we have been able to show that we 
have eliminated all sources of error, and been able to weigh all possible - 
explanations. 
Let us then try to carry on our Society in the spirit that pervaded all the 
work of him to whom this Society owes everything—whose loss, when last 
I came among you we had so recently to deplore ; a spirit of fearless and 
manly grappling with difficulties—a spirit of vigorous, prompt, and vigorous 
carrying out of whatever was taken in hand—a spirit of generous and 
hearty co-operation with fellow-workers—a wide range of interests—not 
meaning by this, scattered desultory thought—but thought, like Narozroy’s, 
ready to be concentrated at once where the battle must be fought. 
